Category Archives: Essential Reading for Online Journalism

Reuters: The economics of the New York Times paywall

Posted on by
Reply
Felix Salmon: "it’ll be much easier to change the number of articles that people can read for free than it will be to change the price of a monthly or annual subscription. ... the experience of the FT suggests that there’s a strong temptation to [gradually reduce the number of free articles per month]: it has been dialing down n to a very low level, as it becomes increasingly addicted to online subscription revenue."

Publish2 Blog: Nine Steps to Verified Link Journalism

Posted on by
Reply
"If you see a blog post titled '10 Iconic Journalists Every J-Student Should Study' and want to share it with your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or old-fashioned e-mail contacts, please consider what you’re endorsing when you link to it. ... I’ve wondered since last night, when I first saw the link, if people realized what it was: linkbaiting as SEO, with the hopes of increasing traffic to an irrelevant site, boosting its rank in search results for the keywords in its URL."

Daggle: If Newspapers Were Stores, Would Visitors Be “Worthless” Then?

Posted on by
Reply
Essential reading from Danny Sullivan: "As the war of words ramps up between Google and some news publishers, the latest spin seems to be how “worthless” the traffic is that Google sends. In reality, the traffic probably does have value, but the newspapers are likely doing a terrible job of monetizing it."

The Shatzkin Files: Aggregation and curation: two concepts that explain a lot about digital change

Posted on by
Reply
"Aggregation ... simply means pulling together things which are not necessarily connected. Curation is a term that has always referred to the careful selection and pruning of aggregates, such as for a museum or an art exhibition. But the concept in the digital content world means the selection and presentation of these disparate items to help a browser or consumer navigate and select from them. Aggregation without curation is, normally, not very helpful. Curation creates the brand."

Daggle.com: Dear WSJ: To Avoid Google Disease, Please Put A Condom On Your Content

Posted on by
Reply
Robert Thomson doesn't like promiscuity of readers who get their news online, and blames Google: "the whole Google model is based on digital disloyalty. It’s about disloyalty to creators." Danny Sullivan responds...

Online Journalism Blog: Ten ways journalism has changed in the last ten years (Blogger’s Cut)

Posted on by
Reply
Great piece by Paul Bradshaw, from March 2008 - I particularly like this: "Most read, most commented, most emailed. Hits, pageviews and unique visitors. If you felt your editor’s news sense was as bad as his fashion sense, the measurability of the web gave you valuable ammunition; but if you thought Performance Related Pay was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet."

Paul Graham: Post-Medium Publishing

Posted on by
Reply
"There have always been people in the business of selling information, but that has historically been a distinct business from publishing. And the business of selling information to consumers has always been a marginal one. ... People will pay for information they think they can make money from. That's why they paid for those stock tip newsletters, and why companies pay now for Bloomberg terminals and Economist Intelligence Unit reports. But will people pay for information otherwise? History offers little encouragement."

Mediactive: Eleven Things I’d Do If I Ran a News Organization

Posted on by
Reply
I particularly like number 3 on Dan Gillmor's list: "Every print article would have an accompanying box called 'Things We Don’t Know' — a list of questions our journalists couldn’t answer in their reporting. TV and radio stories would mention the key unknowns. Whatever the medium, the organization’s website would include an invitation to the audience to help fill in the holes, which exist in every story."

Albert Sun: Price Discriminate! The economics of charging for online content

Posted on by
Reply
"What you really need to do to monetize content is to take a page from the airlines and freemium web services and every other company with a product ever and learn how to price discriminate. Not only will you make much more money doing it, you will produce much better quality journalism as well."

BuzzMachine: Journalists: Where do you add value?

Posted on by
Reply
Jeff Jarvis: "Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore. Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality. My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest."

The Big Money: Death a la Carte: It’s not Google that’s killing the media

Posted on by
Reply
Content unbundling, not Google or aggregation is the disruptive problem for media companies, argues Mark Gimein: "Memory is short, and people have forgotten what it was that Google saved them from. Before the triumph of search, the standard prediction was that the future of media was going to be dominated by portals like America Online. Folks believed that with these entryways, any media organization that wanted an audience would have to pay for carriage ... The total haul from news on the Web is not nearly sufficient to support everything that goes into reporting and presenting it. The reason for this has nothing to do with Google and everything to do with a la carte pricing. ... The perceived value of individual pieces of content is much less than the perceived value of an entire HBO subscription, album, or magazine."